Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Some random, but connected info about mental illness and religion. Given what we know about mental illness and about the best arguments that advocates have been able to muster for God, our first thought when we encounter someone with intense religious convictions should not be to take his/her arguments or reasonings too seriously but to ask, "What are the symptoms of mental illness that she is exhibiting?" The behaviors of the most religious among us: hyper-religiousity, hyper-moralism, evangelism, hypergraphia, visions, voices, circumstantiality, disassociated states, states of religious ecstasy, euphoria, and moral elevation. And when otherwise serious academics get involved in protracted and complicated defenses of religious belief, how is that not comparable to infamous Harvard psychiatrist John Mack getting swept up by the UFO abduction testimonies of his patients?

Geschwind syndrome, also known as "Gastaut-Geschwind" is a characteristic personality syndrome consisting of symptoms such as circumstantiality, hypergraphia, altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality, meaning a decreased interest), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses), hyper-religiosity and/or hyper-morality or moral ideas that is present in some epilepsy patients. This syndrome is particularly associated with temporal lobe epilepsy occurring in the left hemisphere of the brain. For identification, the term "Geschwind syndrome" has been suggested as a name for this group of behavioral phenomena. There has currently been both support[1] and criticism[2][3] in suggestion of this syndrome. Currently the strongest support arises from many clinicians who describe and attempt to classify patients with seizures with these personality features. The term Geschwind's Syndrome comes from one of the two people who first characterized the syndrome: Norman Geschwind. His associate was Stephen Waxman, who also did a great deal of work in the field. Note that Geschwind's Syndrome can be seen both in the inter-ictal (between seizures) and the ictal (during seizures) states.

And some more serious research from Advances in Neurology:"The Geschwind syndrome," Benson DF.

Department of Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine 90024.

A characteristic personality syndrome consisting of circumstantiality (excessive verbal output, stickiness, hypergraphia), altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses) is present in some epilepsy patients. For identification, the term "Geschwind syndrome" has been suggested as a name for this group of behavioral phenomena. Support for, and criticism against, the existence of this syndrome as a specific personality disorder has produced more fire than substance, but the presence of an unsettled, ongoing controversy has been acknowledged. At present, the strongest support stems from the many clinicians who have described and attempted to manage seizure patients with these personality features. Carefully directed studies are needed to confirm or deny that the Geschwind syndrome represents a specific epilepsy/psychiatric disorder.

Hypergraphia is an overwhelming urge to write, where patients often produce tens or hundreds of thousands of words in manuscripts, letters, fiction, or grand philosophical theories of everything.

Philosophy departments, not surprisingly, are often a locus for people with many of these symptoms/disorders. We frequently receive large tomes, meticulously typed, in the mail referred to our faculty for consideration. An author, who feels the urgent need to share his profound metaphysical and theological insights, wants to be recognized for the special knowledge he has uncovered. A hyper-evangelism, or need to share these special insights with the world and acquire converts, is also often part of the author's maladies. In the age of emails, I'll receive 5-100 emails a week from people suffering from these disorders.

11 comments:

Thanks for the references. Alvin Plantinga appears to me to suffer from a sub-pathological form of factitious/somatoform disorder (or Munchhausen syndrome by proxy). I listened to one of his responses to the problem of evil in which he insists that the best possible world contains the “atonement”, but sin & evil are necessary for the “atonement.” This is backwards reasoning, like most apologetic sophistry.

To his credit (or perhaps detriment), he at least has biblical support for his MSbP:

Romans 11:32 (NLT) – “For God has imprisoned everyone in disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.”

John 15:22,24 – If I had not come & spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin.

John 9:1-3 -...He saw a man blind from birth. & His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

John 11:14-15 – So then he told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead, & for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe."

Plantinga’s even responded to the charge that his view is consistent with MSbP, by stating that his god can ethically torture or kill humans against their will (& not for their own benefit) if yhwh thinks that his victims might be choosing to refrain from giving their consent to their torture and murder out of inability, ignorance or “disordered affections.”

He is, no doubt, a very intelligent man who’s had his moral sensibilities eviscerated by his superstitions. Too bad.

Sam, thanks for this comment. It's really interesting. I've done some looking around for someplace where Plantinga says something like what you ascribe to him here and I can't find it. Where is this claim that God can ethically torture or kill humans against their will if they are no cooperating out of ignorance or corruption?

You can find the comments in “Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil” edited by Peter Van Inwagen. Plantinga writes a section titled, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’”. You’ll find him addressing the MSbP charge on page 14 under the section “Objections”. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, so correct me if I’ve misrepresented him. The comment about the best possible world containing the ‘atonement’ I believe was given during a presentation hosted by the ironically titled Veritas Forum. You can find that on their website.

I reread part of the article. He does not state what I said explicitly, but my conclusion of what he said is strongly implied in the paper.

There must be different versions floating around the web. The version I just read has the relevant passage on page 19, titled “C. Munchausen by proxy?” On page 22, he says:

“But suppose still further, that I am able to make the decision [to accept suffering] and in fact would not accept the suffering; but suppose God knows that this unwillingness on my part would be due only to ignorance: if I knew the relevant facts, then I would accept the suffering. In that case too, God's perfect love, as far as I can see, would not preclude his permitting me to suffer. Finally, suppose further yet that God knows that I would not accept the suffering in question, but only because of disordered affections; if I had the right affections (and also knew enough), then I would accept the suffering: in this case too, as far as I can see, his being perfectly loving would not preclude his allowing me to suffer. In this case God would be like a mother who, say, insists that her eight-year-old child take piano lessons or go to church or school.”

If you consider Plantinga’s rationalizations elsewhere for yhwh-initiated atrocities within the Hebrew bible, and given that Plantinga believes that his god owes mankind nothing, I think it’s fair to conclude that Plantinga believes that his god _could_ ethically torture us against our will if this god thought we weren’t submitting to his tortures for the right reasons (and there ARE no right reasons).

Revelation 2:26-27 “To him who overcomes & does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations--He will rule them with an iron scepter; he will dash them to pieces like pottery."

So for Plantinga, if a mother with MSbP strongly suspects that her child would have consented to her poisoning him _if only he knew and understood_ how much pleasure she derives from the praise and sympathy elicited from others by the subsequent care and nurturing she provides, then this intuition makes poisoning or torture ethical.

By this reasoning, it follows that his god knows that I cannot accept or respect him and therefore enter heaven, but only because of ignorance or “disordered affections” (let’s say a “hard heart”). If I had the right affections (and also knew enough), then I would accept & respect this god. This god, then, ought to place every human in heaven, whether they consent to it or not. That is one conclusion that I know Plantinga could not accept.

This is great, Sam. Thanks for finding it and explaining. I am just amazed by it too, like you. These views--van Inwagen's, Plantinga's, Alston's, etc.--are outrageous from the start. But it's when you really get down deep in the woods, like these passages that you've found, where the sheer insanity and convoluted rationalizations really come out. Yeah, God has a bizarre form of MSbP. And what Plantinga makes me think of is the battered wife, or mentally corrupted atrocity victim, who cracks and constructs elaborate justifications for her husband's abuse of her. She deserves it, she insists, because she really is contemptible, pathetic, petty, and horrible. There's a particular type of deep self-loathing, and fundamental contempt for oneself and for humankind that resides in these guys hearts. This twisted atonement/salvation model really appeals to them because it licenses them to decry humans for being so morally corrupt, contemptible, and loathsome. In their hearts, these guys want to grovel and wallow in a pit of self-hatred, so Christian metaphysics strikes a sympathetic chord. If anyone tells us with a straight face that it makes sense that God would artificially construct a situation where, out of ignorance and imperfect, we deserve to be punished, tortured, and maimed in order to bring us back to God (When God could have avoided the entire farce from the start), I think we have to conclude that he's just left the playing field of serious rationality.

I freely admit this armchair psychologizing lacks proper clinical definition. I don’t think Geshwind syndrome, MSbP, Stockholm syndrome or battered person syndrome are officially recognized in the DSM-IV, but the parallels are uncanny.

Look up battered person syndrome [classified as ICD-9 (WHO’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases) code 995.81. Repeated cycles of violence & reconciliation can result in a symptomotology of beliefs & attitudes as part of a PTSD listed in the DSM-IV] in Wikipedia.

1) The victim believes that the violence was her fault

2) The victim has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere

3) The victim fears for her life &/or her children’s lives

4) The victim has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent & omniscient.

To echo the title of your post, ‘sound familiar’? Where do they get these ideas? From their book:

Hebrews 12:4-17– “for those whom the Lord loves he disciplines, & he scourges every son whom he receives...but He disciplines us for our good”

Galatians 3:13 – God cursed Jesus (but that curse is our fault) so that we would no longer be cursed by the law that god, himself, cursed us with, as long as we pay complete attention & devotion to god, or else we will be tortured for eternity by an omnipresent & omniscient entity

Psalms 119:71,75 – “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees…& that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.”

Romans 9:18-24 – Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for honorable use & another for dishonorable use?

Daniel 4:34-36 - All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, & He does what he wills with the host of heaven & the inhabitants of the earth. There is no one who can stay His hand or say to Him, “What are you doing?”

1. Hostages who develop Stockholm syndrome often view the perpetrator as giving life by simply not taking it.

Exodus 15:26 – if you obey yhwh, then “I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am YHWH, who heals you”

2. The hostage taker threatens to kill the victim. The captive judges it safer to align with the perpetrator, endure the hardship of captivity, & comply with the captor than to resist & face death.

I Peter 2:18-21 “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good & considerate, but also to those who are harsh. For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God.”

3. The captive sees the perpetrator as showing some degree of kindness. Kindness serves as the cornerstone of Stockholm syndrome; the condition will not develop unless the captor exhibits it in some form toward the hostage. However, captives often misinterpret a lack of abuse as kindness & may develop feelings of appreciation for this perceived benevolence. If the captor is purely hostile & abusive, the hostage will respond with hatred. But, if perpetrators show some kindness, victims will sublimate their anger in response to the terror & concentrate on the captors’ “good side” to protect themselves.

I was listening to the “My ways are not your ways” conference held at Notre Dame I think in 2009. Eleonore Stump (who appears to me to be a genuinely decent person) was responding to a presentation by Evan Fales, if I remember correctly. She asked with exasperation, if the most straightforward & honest reading of the judeo-xian texts make the authoritarian wickedness of yhwh so abundantly clear, why would so many generations of scholars work so diligently to preserve the tradition & so many generations of adherents work so hard to follow the religion? I think the symptoms of those suffering from Stockholm syndrome establish that the many ethical & loving passages of the books are absolutely essential for victims to voluntarily submit to their persecutors. The symptoms of those suffering from battered person syndrome establish that victims are convinced that the fault for violence lies with the victim. In short, fear is absolutely mandatory for authoritarianism to function. Biblical prescriptions for fear of yhwh are not in short supply.

These apologists remind me of yet another poorly-defined syndrome, that of codependency, or inverted narcissim: a tendency to behave in overly passive or nurturing ways that negatively impact one's relationships, characterized by denial, low self-esteem, excessive compliance &/or control patterns, such as a strong compulsion to defend, justify, excuse & rationalize away the narcissist’s destructive behavior. This is typically used to describe the behavior of the enablers of alcoholics.

“There's a particular type of deep self-loathing, and fundamental contempt for oneself and for humankind that resides in these guys hearts.“

Yes, you hear it among some of the most well-respected philosophers of religion all the way down to the most vitriolic AM radio broadcast. For the fundamentalist, _anything_ less than a complete conviction in the absolute depraved & debased moral status of _Homo sapien_ is an expression of the most profound & thoroughly contemptible vanity & pride. It is a matter of absolute black & absolute white. One is either committed to the purest form of self-hate & torture-worthy abasement, or one is the most extreme, dangerous & abject evil narcissist. This is a false dichotomy. A mentally healthy person can have great contempt for one’s own repeated moral failings while reserving hope in one’s future potential to do the right thing & inspiration from one’s past moral successes.

I better stop before you accuse me of hypergraphia. Do I smell oranges? :)

I found this post a little bizarre. The urge to identify religious belief with mental illness, and more generally the urge to label religious behaviors as disorders or syndromes, except in very extreme cases, should probably be resisted. While it's interesting to study possible psychological bases for religious (and other) beliefs, I'd hope to at least gesture at charitable philosophical analysis of the arguments or reasons one might provide for such beliefs. The amateur psychologizing (in particular the extended diagnosis of Alvin Plantinga in the comment thread) feels like it may itself be pushing into the realm of insanity and reminds me of the stuff one sees from some theists about atheists.

This post is indeed provocative, and it is a line of argument that will surely ruffle many feathers; however, I think, philosophically, it is a natural response ( I'm actually kind of surprised more people have not argued this) to those like Plantinga who claim to poses a "Sensus Divinitatus."

For Plantinga's own position(!) creates this dichotomy, where either we atheists are mentally ill (and lack this God faculty of mind), or he is...and i think the evidence overwhelmingly supports the latter. ( I think Plantinga's argument is the truly provocative and offense argument here, and Matt is just responding with the warrented reply: "You must be crazy...literally!"

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Atheism

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.